We Just Call Them Birds

I previously shared a post with my “Life List” birds from our trip to Southern Baja in March.
Here I’m sharing photos of some of the other birds we saw along the way.

What appears in your imagination when you think of birds?
The beauty of a great egret taking flight over still water?
The evocative melody of a meadowlark?
The shimmering iridescence of a mallard drake’s crown?
The fierce, ancient stare of a raptor?
Their astonishing presence on every continent and in almost every habitat on Earth?
Their extraordinary variety—from a hummingbird scarcely larger than your thumb to a 300-pound flightless ostrich?

But do you think of dinosaurs?
You should.

I’m using this post showing the birds of Baja to reflect on their remarkable relationship to the dinosaurs of the distant past.

You’ve probably read that scientists now believe that birds are what remain of the dinosaurs on Earth. The theory goes beyond just saying that birds are their descendants; birds are dinosaurs. They are the surviving branch of that immense and ancient family tree.

Watching the recent Netflix series Dinosaurs helped me imagine this deep history more vividly. The series depicts some dinosaurs as small, feathered, flying creatures that look surprisingly like familiar birds—rather than the lumbering, scaly giants that populated my childhood imagination. It becomes easier to glimpse the dinosaur in a pelican’s enormous beak, a hawk’s curved talons, or the intensity of a heron standing motionless as it hunts at the edge of a pond.

When I was a child, dinosaurs were generally thought of as cold-blooded creatures, more like snakes and alligators than birds. Later, evidence accumulated indicating that many dinosaurs were warm-blooded or had metabolisms quite different from those of modern reptiles—helping fuel their active, high-energy lives. Dinosaurs that once appeared in our imaginations as naked, gray and scaly are now being reconstructed with feathers, colorful skin, crests, plumes and other adornments. I wonder if they if they called to each other with beautiful songs? Imagine a tyrannosaurus rex singing its heart out like a wren or giving a mournful wail like a loon.

But then comes one of the great mysteries:
What allowed birds to survive the asteroid impact and the mass extinction that wiped out the other non-avian dinosaurs?

There isn’t a single simple answer. Their small size was important. So was their ability to fly, which gave them mobility and access to places where other animals could not easily go. Some surviving birds also had diets that allowed them to make use of seeds, nuts and other foods that remained available when much of the vegetation collapsed. Their small bodies required fewer resources, they reproduce quickly, and their ability to move through the landscape may have helped them find whatever pockets of food and shelter remained.

In the aftermath of the catastrophe, the world was darkened by ash and debris, ecosystems were collapsing, and food webs were unraveling. Most dinosaurs disappeared. But somewhere in that devastated world, a few small feathered survivors endured.

And from those survivors, eventually, came the astonishing diversity of birds we know today.

I fell in love with dinosaurs as a child. In the 1950s, I was given an early set of hard plastic dinosaurs that included a Tyrannosaurus rex, a Stegosaurus and a Brontosaurus. I could lose myself for hours imagining these enormous, strange creatures living within a world that was inconceivably different from my own. We would regularly visit the world-famous fossil dinosaur collection at the Carnegie Museum near Pittsburgh. Standing beside the towering T-rex – even if it was just bones – magically made it real.

My favorite scene in the Jurassic Park movies is the beginning of the first film, when Laura Dern’s character looks out over a landscape filled with roaming herds of dinosaurs. Her face expresses such complete, open wonder. That sense of awe and curiosity is what I loved about dinosaurs as a child, and it is still what draws me to them now.

Since those childhood days, hundreds of additional dinosaur species have been identified, and new fossils and discoveries continue to reshape our understanding of these remarkable animals. Our picture of the dinosaur world is constantly being revamped.

And now, when I look at a bird, I sometimes see something more than a bird. I see a tiny survivor of a vanished, mysterious world.

The dinosaurs are not all gone. Some of them are perched in the trees outside your window, others are soaring above the desert, wading along shorelines, singing from bushes and flashing their wings across the sky. Maybe you have one at home in a cage or possibly you are roasting one for dinner.

The dinosaurs are still here. We just call them birds.

(Leave a comment so I know you were here.)

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